When the Apple Watch was introduced, Apple touted features like fitness capabilities and Apple Pay, but there was little mention of how it interfaces with devices other than the iPhone.
Despite this apparent limit to pairing with one device, Apple Watch clearly has potential to be more than simply an iPhone accessory. While you can tweet from it and view updates, its Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities have suggested it can do far more. Many of these possibilities have just been speculation, but sing Apple Watch as a controller for various devices has become clearer following a recent Bloomberg interview with Tim Cook.
In the interview, Bloomberg mentions an Apple TV app for the watch was not seen during the keynote, and in response Tim Cook says, “There’s—I don’t think we showed this. I’ve got a little advanced copy. And so it will operate your Apple TV, and you can imagine that it can control other things as well.”
This is especially true given Apple’s direction with advanced programming frameworks like HealthKit and HomeKit, where developers can implement ways to interact with external devices including refrigerators, thermostats, lights, and other home sensors. These options are part of iOS 8 and were pushed to iPhones, iPads, and the Apple TV with recent updates.
With HomeKit and HeathKit, and with confirmation that Apple Watch will interface with them, it is clear that Apple intends to offer a full digital home experience, embedded in all of its devices. In addition, with these features associated with online services like Back To My Mac and Find My iPhone with iCloud, it is clear that we are only seeing a brief preview of the potential that is to come with the interoperability of Apple’s products, their interaction with other products, and the ability to interface with many (if not all) of these things directly from your wrist.
There you go – you answered your own question from 2 weeks ago about Apple Watch and Yosemite! If it can talk to a refrigerator or TV, it’ll damned well talk to a laptop;-)
I can see a use for talking to WiFi enabled home appliances; this would be most useful from remote locations, though I’m not sure how that would work. There are already products on the market that work through a home security system to do things like turning lights off – or off – closing the garage door and such. How far Apple proposes to go in this direction remains to be seen, but the possibilities are interesting to say the least.
As for controlling an Apple TV, this would only be useful once voice control is available. Otherwise the watch is too small to useful as a remote.
The trick will be finding what can augment what an iPhone rather than duplicating it’s functions.